LGCS 122: Methods in Language Research

Jesse A. Harris :: Spring 2014

Instructor information: Course information:

Jesse Harris Course time: M 7:00 – 9:30PM
Linguistics & Cognitive Science Course location: Edmunds 217
Edmunds, Room 203 Office hours: W 3–5 and by appointment
Email: Jesse.Harris@pomona.edu
Course website: http://pages.pomona.edu/∼jah24747/courses/methods/methods_s14.html

Overview:
In this course, you will be introduced to the basic components of data collection and analysis relevant to
experimental language research. We want to avoid collecting data without clear hypotheses and predic-
tions, and so we start here, moving on to data collection only after we have worked through the design
stages. This course should be useful to you, so from the onset of this course you should strive to formulate
testable hypotheses that are relevant to any current work and research interests.
The topic this year is on lexical meaning, a key concept in both psychology and linguistics. In particular,
we will be evaluating models of how polysemous words are represented and accessed in the mental lexicon.
For example, school may be refer to a building, an institution, a group of people, and so on. Are all of these
meanings stored in the lexicon? Are all of these meanings activated at once, or are only some? What
determines which words become activated at what point in language processing?
We will survey a variety of experimental designs and data collection procedures. First and foremost, we
will concentrate on developing practical skills that will enable you to conduct your own experimental
research. Currently, the course concentrates on lexical, sentence and discourse level processing, with
discussion of related measures, such as priming effects and questionnaire design. However, additional
topics may be introduced to best fit the needs and interests of the students in the class.
Topics:
• Linguistic and psychological models of the lexicon
• The research process and experimental design
• Basic statistical methods and analyses
• Data collection and analysis
• Presentation of data
• Practice, practice, and more practice!
Communication expectations: I expect that you will check your email every day, and reply to messages
from me as soon as possible.

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Requirements:
Prerequisites:
Introduction to Linguistics (LGCS 10), Introduction to Cognitive Science (LGCS 11), and one of Syntax
(LGCS 105), Semantics (LGCS 106), or Phonology (LGCS 108).
Assessment:
Participation 10% Eye tracking training, NIH certification, in-class participation
Concept questions 10% Short quizzes
Assignments 20% Assignments from Lexical Meaning and short essays
Statistics homework 30% Assignments in R
Final project 30% Write-up and presentation of original work
Participation: There will be many opportunities for course participation, including training in eye tracking
or other methods, online NIH certification, and discussion.
Concept questions: I will provide you with a set of 4–5 concept questions during selected class sessions. I
will pick one of these questions for a short, 5 minute quiz at the beginning of the next class. On occasion, a
single question might be posed on Sakai for you to answer by 9PM the night before class. These questions
are graded on a simple scale from 0 to 2:
0 Did not answer question.
1 Provided a minimal response which did not show adequate understanding.
2 Showed clear understanding in response.
Assignments: There are three assignments from exercises in the book, as well as short essays in response
to more open ended question prompts, in the first 6 weeks of the class. These are intended to solidify the
concepts in the reading, to prime you for discussion, and to help you start thinking about the final project.
Statistics homework: You are expected to read all the assigned readings before class, and complete the
homeworks on statistics, some of which may draw from real data collected in the lab. We will be using
the statistical programming software R exclusively for these homeworks, and I expect you to upload your
R code to your Dropbox folder on Sakai along with your assignments. You may download R here:
http://www.r-project.org/
Additional assistance with R is offered by the CCMS Software Lab; please check here for details:
http://ccms.claremont.edu/CCMS-Software-Lab
Final project: You will present your research projects at the end of the term, along with data you have
collected, and submit a write-up of the project in APA format (10–15 pp). This assignment is ‘scaffolded’
in that it is composed of several smaller assignments that culminate in the final paper, including a pre-
liminary research proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a revised research proposal. All final projects
must have a norming experiment to pretest the materials that you will be using, and the results of these
experiments will be presented in class.
Disability services:
If you think you need accommodations due to a disability, please let me know as soon as possible. Some
aspects of the courses may be modified to facilitate your full participation in the course. As soon as
you make me aware of your needs, we can contact the 504 Coordinator in the Dean of Students Of-
fice to help us determine the appropriate accommodations. To request academic accommodations due

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to a disability, please contact Jan Collins-Eaglin if you are a Pomona student. She can be contacted at
Jan.Collins-Eaglin@pomona.edu or at 909-607-2147. If you attend another one of the Claremont Colleges,
please contact your home college’s disability officer:
Pitzer Jill Hawthorne jill_hawthorne@pitzer.edu
Scripps Sonya Delatorre-Iniguez sdelator@scrippscollege.edu
Harvey Mudd Maggie Browning maggie_browning@hmc.edu
CMC Julia Easley jeasley@cmc.edu
Please do not record the lectures with permission from me. If you need note taking assistance, let me
know and we will discuss alternatives.
Grade schemata:
Grades will be assigned according to the following table:

100 – 93% A 75 – 72% C

92 – 90% A- 71 – 70% C-
89 – 86% B+ 69 – 66% D+
85 – 82% B 65 – 63% D
81 – 80% B- 62 – 60% D-
79 – 76% C+ < 60% F

Class policies:
In-class behavior:
I expect an atmosphere of respect and tolerance, commensurate with the institution that you represent.
Spirited debate is encouraged, but be courteous to your classmates!
Computers and cell phones should be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary. I reserve the
right to confiscate them, should I find them to be distracting. Checking your email, surfing the web,
etc. during class not only distracts me and limits what you take away from the course, it deprives other
students from your potentially valuable contributions. If you are in doubt, please come talk to me.
Late work:
Most of us are late at some point. I will allow one late homework assignment, no questions asked, exclud-
ing the in-class concept questions and the final project, up to two days after that assignment was originally
due. Unless accompanied by a college sanctioned excuse – e.g., health or family issues, the grade on late
assignments will decrease by one letter grade every day they are late. Cases of true emergencies are of
course exempt.
Academic honesty:
Academic honesty will be taken very seriously in this course. Do not present ideas or work as your own
if it is not; do not present language as your own if is not. You should feel free to consult with me if you
have questions or are unclear about what would constitute a breach of academic honesty, and you should
be familiar with the official academic honesty policy of the college and the consequences with failing to
adhere to it:
http://pomona.catalog.acalog.com/content.php?catoid=3&navoid=80#Academic_Honesty

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Readings:
Required textbooks:
Murphy, M. Lynne (2010). Lexical Meaning. Cambridge University Press.
Rayner, Keith, Alexander Pollatsek, Jane Ashby, & Charles Clifton, Jr. (2012). The Psychology of Reading.
2nd edition. Psychology Press.
Walker, Ian. (2010). Research Methods and Statistics. Palgrave MacMillan.
Dalgaard, Peter. (2008). Introductory Statistics with R. (ISR). 2nd edition. Springer. Chs. 1–6.
http://blais.claremont.edu/record=b3530008∼S0
Additional – and optional – statistics resources:
Allerhand, Mike (2011). A Tiny Handbook of R. Springer.
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-642-17980-8
Field, Andy, Jeremy Miles, & Zoë Field. (2012). Discovering Statistics Using R. Sage Publishing. In lab
library.

Other readings:
We will also be reading a number of articles. These readings are posted on the course website along with
the course session that they will be discussed. Please consult the website regularly, as the schedule may
change.
Ferreira, Fernanda & Nicole D. Patson (2007). The ‘good enough’ approach to language comprehension.
Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 71–83.
Fishbein, Joel & Jesse A. Harris (submitted with revisions). Making sense of Kafka: Structural biases
induce early sense commitment for metonyms. Submitted to Journal of Memory and Language.
Foraker, Stephani & Gregory L. Murphy (2012) Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning
dominance. Journal of Memory and Language, 76, 407–425.
Frazier, Lyn (1990). Sentence Processing. Kluwer Academic Publishers, chapter 3.
Frazier, Lyn & Keith Rayner (1990). Taking on semantic commitments: Processing multiple meanings vs.
multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 181-200.
Frisson, Steven (2009). Semantic Underspecification in Language Processing. Language and Linguistics
Compass, 3, 111–127.
Lupker, Stephen J. (2007). Representation and processing of lexically ambiguous words. In: M. Gareth
Gaskell (Ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 2nd edition, pp. 159-174.
Mitchell, Don C. (2004). On-line methods in language processing: Introduction and historical review. In:
Carreiras, Manuel, and Charles E. Clifton (Eds.) The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking,
ERP and beyond, pp. 15-32, Psychology Press.
Schütze, Carson T. (2010). Linguistic evidence and grammatical theory. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:
Cognitive Science, 2, 206-221.

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